When starting a brand new website it's going to be a challenge to create interesting
and dynamic content yet alone finding the right tools and grasping the precise knowledge on how to advertise your site. You may have found the challenge of finding a reliable web hosting package tough enough but that is merely a stroll in the park compared to the work involved when marketing your site.
Once you have your basic website design in place, the next step is creating content. Depending on whether you're writing the content yourself or have a set of copywriters, it is essential that what goes up on your site is informative and new material and is enriched with specific relevant rich keywords. This is one of the first vital steps that you can take towards a good SEO practice as having rich keywords in your page content improves the chances of search engine spiders ranking your website higher for those specific keywords.
It is important to remember though that keyword spamming will cause more harm than good, so always make sure to check your keyword density within the body text to make sure you're within safe limits. You can find several online keyword analysers that will help you out if you're not sure of how many keywords your content should have. It is also worth noting acceptable keyword density levels vary among search engines, some tolerate up to 2% of the text containing keywords while some accept up to 5%.
Meta tags are a good and easy way to improve your site listing in the search engine results page (SERP's) by providing information about what your site is actually about. Once again it is useful to have relevant keywords in your Meta tags for the search engine spiders to crawl effectively and list your site in their SERP's.
Most webmasters ignore the importance of H1 headings and some don't even bother adding them but if you use relevant keywords in your headings then this also improves your chances of ranking higher in the SERP's.
It takes no longer than a minute to have your site indexed on a search engine and allows for search engines spiders to crawl your website and index the contents which is then stored for quick retrieval when a user types relevant keywords into the search engine. The same applies to directories however unlike search engines who will index your website after a while even if you don't, directories don't actively search for new websites or index them.